Kit (13 page)

Ross continued, unawares. ‘Queen Anne of England was unable to tolerate such an outcome. Why?’

Kit tore her gaze away from that dear muddy little hole.

‘Why would our queen not wish the throne of Spain to fall to the grandson of the French king?’ he pressed.

‘Because,’ said Kit slowly, ‘the nations would be effectively unified. France would have too much power.’

‘Exactly. So the queen declared war on France, in support of the pretender Leopold. England has now formed a “Grand Alliance” with the Holy Roman Empire,’ he pointed to the great mass right in the middle of the map, ‘and Holland …’ He pointed again, to a smaller coastal country just above it. She looked at Holland with interest – home of Maria van Lommen, site of so many hopeless campaigns. The country clung to the edge of the sea, which perhaps explained why it was waterlogged. ‘The wet lands,’ she said, anxious to display her single piece of geographical knowledge.

‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘I have damped my own boots there these two years past. So, to recap: the Grand Alliance have pitted their forces against the army of the “Two Crowns”, and here we are.’

‘So …’ Kit said carefully: ‘France and Spain are fighting with England and the Empire.’

‘Yes.’

‘But …’ She frowned, finding her way. ‘For the last several weeks, we have seen fighting in lands which belong to neither Spain, nor France, nor the Empire. Why is this boot-shaped region caught up in this coil?’

He pointed the stick at her like a schoolmaster. ‘An excellent question. Because,’ he sat beside her and pointed at the mud map, ‘this region is a crucial counter in the game. Our job is to defend this boot. It is a makeweight. He who takes the peninsula takes the crown. If Louis holds it, he has a buffer between the Empire and France. If England holds it, we can march right through France’s back door.’

Kit nodded, slowly. She could see the significance of that oddly shaped piece of land.

‘Defend it we will; and to that end the queen herself has sent her finest weapon, John Churchill, 2nd Duke of Marlborough, to lead us.’ He spoke the name as if he spoke of Christ himself, with something approaching reverence, and he made a little cross on the map at the edge of the empire of mud. ‘We are to meet him here, at Rovereto, and unite our forces.’

‘Tichborne too?’

‘Us, Tichborne, Gardiner – if he can surface from his fountain. With Savoy’s troops too, this will be the biggest defensive force ever deployed.’

‘Savoy?’

‘Eugene of Savoy, prince of this region, and nephew to Leopold, the Holy Roman Emperor. He has a fearsome army.’

‘And now,’ she said, ‘we are in friendly territory.’

‘Yeees,’ he said, stretching the syllable out. ‘There are pockets of rebels who are against Savoy, and think the prince is trying to make incursions into the other regions of the peninsula. So there may not be friends everywhere. Mantova, as you witnessed, is under French control. Every day we must be on our guard. Our friends may not make themselves known, but our enemies doubtless will.’ He crouched before her and took her by the shoulders, giving her a little shake as if she slept. ‘We are riding to make history, Kit.’ Her eyes met his, and she could see tiny campfires burning in them; sparks of excitement.

He stood abruptly. ‘Now, to bed, we must be rested and ready.’

‘Sir?’

He turned. ‘Yes, Kit?’

‘One more question.’

‘Yes?’ He looked so animated that she was reluctant to raise the issue. But she had to know.

‘The babes – were they part of the war?’

She saw it at once, the veil descended on his face
.
‘In a sense.’

‘Forgive me … in what sense? Where did they come from?’

Ross sighed, sat. He looked at her with something approaching affection. ‘You are really just a boy, aren’t you? How old?’

Kit remembered. ‘Sixteen, sir.’

He nodded. ‘No father to tell you such things?’

‘He died, sir. In the Williamite war. This is his sword I wear.’ She shifted to show the handle, and he touched it with one fingertip. ‘Wear it with pride.’

‘Oh, I do.’

He clasped his hands together on his knees and looked into the fire. ‘Those babes were sons and daughters of soldiers too. But not true born. They are the bastards of the regiment.’

‘But … We’ve only just arrived.’

‘
We
have. But there’s been trouble here on the border with the Empire for years. Eugene of Savoy’s troops are all but stationed here. When they don’t fight, they are bored. The women are … raped by the soldiers, and they cannot keep the children.’

‘Why?’

Ross seemed discomfited. ‘
I
don’t know, Kit. They are married, or they cannot afford their keep, or the child would show them to be impure, and prevent them finding a husband. Many reasons.’

Kit digested this in silence. Ross, settling by the fire once more, was clearly unwilling to discuss the subject further. She answered his distant goodnight, and rolled herself in the horse blanket, which smelled comfortingly of Flint.

She settled down and watched the fire through half-closed eyes. She heard again Ross’s voice softly talking. A deformed king, an empty throne, seven kingdoms at swords drawn. It sounded like one of Maura’s stories, but this tale was true. She saw in the flames the map of Europe, rendered in gold, on fire; the flames spreading to each region until the continent was a raging conflagration; and the babes and she and Richard and Ross were all in the middle of it.

Where we would be shot without warning …

‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)

As the dragoons travelled ever upwards, the cold and ice descended like a bride’s veil.

‘We’ve ridden into winter,’ Kit remarked to the dragoon beside her, a gloomy young man called Ingoldsby.

Ingoldsby shrugged his head right down into his shoulders, tucking down his chin. ‘It’s always winter in the mountains.’ Frost laced the tough mountain grass, snow eagles circled above. ‘Waiting for someone to die,’ said Mr Ingoldsby. The cold wreathed their lungs, pinched their cheeks, froze their extremities. Kit’s fingers and toes seemed strange to her – as if they belonged to someone else. Each inhalation was raw; her lips were thick and slow and dumb, her ears a burning numbness, her fingers smarting. Her breath smoked like clouds of incense.

Captain Ross explained as they rode that it was Eugene of Savoy who had commanded that the Alliance forces gather covertly using obscure mountain passes. And so they were climbing in the hurting cold, and winter, as if to mitigate her harshness, showed off her great beauty. Even the constant aching discomfort of the cold could not blind Kit to pine trees rimed with crystals and impossibly high white cataracts frozen into folds like candle grease. The dragoons climbed the steep valley, not by a rocky pass or goat road, but a miraculous stone staircase cut into the mountain and known as the Six Hundred Steps. There was a monastery at the head of it with a welcoming cross set upon its finial, a monastery which they had to reach by nightfall or freeze. They would billet themselves on the good monks for the night, whether they were welcome or no. The steps were broad enough, barely, for four feet of a horse to stand upon, but their breadth and gradient made the climb arduous for the greys, and anxious for the riders, for a mere stumble could pitch both horse and dragoon to the foot of the ravine. Kit kept her eyes on the stairs, lengthening and shortening Flint’s stride to fit each step, but now and again flicked her gaze to the monastery above, a miraculous structure which seemed to be cut out of one piece into the very rock of the mountain itself. The lowering sun turned the humble hermitage into a place of gold, and cut deep black shadows beneath the staircase. Weary and freezing, Kit counted fifty steps, before losing count. For every step thereafter she cursed instead, with her precious new vocabulary, the unknown prince of Savoy.

Ross caught her up on the stone stairs. The ground was now too hard for Ross to draw his maps for Kit, but he still took pains to explain matters to her. ‘The prince of Savoy is a master strategist,’ he said, as they rode side by side up the steps. ‘He is making evident plans to descend on the French via Brescia and the Adige. But in reality, his and Marlborough’s forces are amassing covertly at Rovereto, using obscure passes like this one. Some of these ways have not been used for centuries – this one has not been used since Charles V was Emperor.’ Kit did not know when this was, but the way Ross said the name it sounded like a long time ago. ‘Of course, this means we must be alert to French outriders and spies.’

Kit nodded and tucked her chin into the flimsy comforter which covered the lower part of her face. Her heavy felted uniform felt as thin as onion paper. Outriders and spies seemed as nothing to the creeping cold, a shapeshifting and insubstantial enemy: a stalking horse whose ribs you could number, a skinny grey she-wolf watching from the ravine with bleak and ravenous eyes, the white raptors wheeling watchfully above, the grey creeping spectre of a hermit collecting wood with white hands like jointed spiders. The cold was all these things; it was everywhere, watching behind every tree and in the very air, rolling over every ridge, an ever-present and, it seemed, much more tangible threat than the French. But she was so numb she could not seem to care; her crystallised lashes closed in such a welcome sleep that when the shooting started she was almost too stupid with cold to know what was happening.

Her mind, snail-slow, told her that it was the crack of a whip; that one of the dragoons had had to lash his mount up the steep pass. The whipcrack rang out, the sound bouncing from both sides of the valley. Flint knew something was amiss before she; the mare reared and Kit had to cling to her saddle – but her efforts were wasted because as soon as she had settled the mare Ross pulled her roughly from the saddle.

Ingoldsby began to panic as the rest of the dragoons hit the frozen stone. He ran back down the stairs, jinking and checking like a coney, but the next blast lifted him clear off his feet. Kit could see he was hit, and he dropped and lay twitching like game. She crawled to him on her elbows and raised his head for him, for he could not. It was an easy task, for the back half of it was gone. Still he tried to say something; but when he opened his mouth he spoke only blood. It poured down his front; carmined his jacket and turned his buttons to rubies. Kit felt herself being pulled away, the hot jellied mess of brains on her hands steaming in the cold. All she could think was that her hands were warm for the first time that day.

More shots rang out from above. They seemed to be coming from the monastery. She was now deaf to the musket shots but could still hear them in her ribs. Her bones seemed to have turned to rope, but she stumbled up the stairs with the rest, leading their horses, panting noiselessly like seeker hounds.

Silence fell, as threatening as the barrage before.

Ross, ducking under his horse’s belly, grabbed Sergeant Taylor by the shoulder. ‘Do we sound the retreat, sir?’ hissed Taylor through his broken teeth.

‘There’s nowhere to go,’ Ross whispered back. ‘We’re wide open, they’ll make marchpane of us. We must storm the monastery. Command the trumpeter.’

Taylor, his disdain for this idea written on his blunt features, forgot to salute and ran down the stair to the trumpeter. The bittersweet song sounded the attack, the blaring notes bouncing off the rocks. But through the melee the training of the Scots Greys showed through – all the dragoons stalked behind their horses, using the meaty flanks to protect them. The batteries began to play the 29th, and every tenth man took charge of ten horses and the remaining dragoons streamed up the stone stairs.

Kit, numb with shock as well as cold, was one of the first to the gatehouse and one of the first to apply her partisan to the studded door; carried forth on a wave, not knowing what she did. From the sheer weight of the battering soldiers and clamouring muskets the door gave way and Kit found herself in an inner courtyard. Cowled figures ran about everywhere, hay swirled in the air like snow, and chickens rose to the skies to be felled by nervy muskets. Kit was shoved bodily behind a tower of barrels, and she breathed hard as she raised her musket. Cheek along barrel; aim. Pull back matchlock; click. Lift cheek, fire. She felled, with her first shot, a musket-wielding monk, and was as surprised as he was. Strip, lower, reload, ram. A cowled monk ran towards her, holding an axe high like an executioner. But her matchlock had jammed from the cold. She spat and rubbed, the monk grew bigger, loomed. Then a sword protruded from his chest and the axe dropped, useless, to the ground.

‘Use your blade, Kit,’ Ross bellowed, dragging his sword from the monk. ‘You may trust that, at least.’ She dropped the musket and drew her father’s sword. The next few moments – hours – were a blur. She fought, hand to hand, not knowing how many she felled, until she began to tire and slip and stumble. A blade bit her shoulder. Time collapsed, for the bell of the little tower above bawled out, giving clamour to the mountains, ringing out through the icy air. Even in the melee, its insistent chime rang in Kit’s head, and after ten, twenty, fifty strokes, she understood its meaning. A bell always rang for a reason. A soul has passed. There is someone at the door. Time at the bar. Come to mass.

Help us.

She grabbed a bunch of Ross’s uniform at the shoulder. ‘Sir,’ she bellowed. ‘We should silence that bell. It is a call for help. There may be more of them in the hills.’ He nodded curtly. ‘Do it,’ he ordered.

Kit stumbled into the dark stairwell of the bell tower. She leant for one blessed moment of reprieve on the cold stone wall, before she could bring herself to move. As she climbed, she imagined cowled monks streaming from the crags to reinforce their brothers. In the belfry, straw-scattered and blindingly bright, she came upon a monk energetically pulling on the bell rope, the recoil of the cord almost yanking him from his feet. Standing there, unseen and unheard, reeling from the close cacophony, Kit could not stab a monk in the back for ringing a bell. She drew her father’s sword and sliced the rope through; the bell fell with a clang on the wooden belfry board. The monk turned, a knife in his hand, dropped the redundant bell rope and swiped at her, slicing her sleeve. After that it was easy. She ran him through, and watched him fall across his bell. She gulped a breath and leaned out of one of the four windows, open to the four winds. Down below, tiny dragoons and monks darted about frantically. She could stay here; hide until it was over. And then she saw Captain Ross. She sheathed her bloody sword, and, mindful of the directive to collect booty, picked up the heavy bell with an effort and staggered back down the stair. At the foot Sergeant Taylor was waiting and wrenched the bell from her arms. ‘I’ll take that,’ he said. ‘Worth summat, bell-metal.’ The bell made a faint sound as it met the buttons of his coat. Kit opened her mouth to protest, closed it again and ducked past him to re-enter the fray.